Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


If The Librarians met the Night at the Museum

The Night Librarian: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Lincoln

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If The Librarians television series met the movie The Night at the Museum you would have The Night Librarian: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Lincoln. Realism, fantasy and literature literally come to life on the pages of this middle grade graphic novel.  While I liked and enjoyed it, I was not “wowed.” Things are familiar (sibling issues, issues with absent parents, really expensive and rare editions of Dracula), and it is just a fun story about stories, siblings, family, communication, being appreciated. We have read […]

The face of the cyborg and detective

Model Five Murder: a sci-fi noir by Tan Juan Gee

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When one is like me and in the position of having emails with online reader links attached, you can read a lot of different things. Most of which you probably asked for, but once in a while you get one that was just free-sent. Or you forgot you requested it. Model Five Murder: a sci-fi noir by Tan Juan Gee was one of those either free-sent or I forgot I requested.  As said, I read it via an online reader copy. And I can read […]

Read for the translator, stay for the spaceship description

Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang

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I like Ken Liu’s own writing, but I love his translations. So when Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang came out about a year ago, I bought it, read the translator’s notes immediately, read the notes to my politely smiling husband, then shelved the book for a later time. The time has come. My knowledge of China is piecemealy and Jumpnauts assumes that the reader has a better understanding of the country and its history than I do – which makes sense since the book and its […]

She had come to save this world and it was already dead.

The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O’Keefe

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I wasn’t really looking for something dark and twisty, but I fell into listening to Ciaran Saward narrate Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Blighted Stars and it was exactly what I wanted. I knew nothing going in, so I’m going to try to say as little as possible while also getting you interested enough to go listen. Tarquin Mercator is a space Prince, the only son of one of the universe’s ruling families. He is an academic, a geologist, who has mostly not been involved in […]

Doomsday Do’s and Doomsday Don’ts

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

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Carl is a normal dude. Except that he is stuck in the apocalypse. With his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. And there is an alien invasion. Plus, Carl and most of what’s left of humanity are involuntarily placed on a Running-Man-style intergalactic game show. And the contestants don’t know who (if anyone) to trust. And the odds are that they will all die very soon. To stave off the inevitable, the characters have to kill monsters (Are they monsters?) and level up. Is it worth it […]

Feeling a bit lactose intolerant after this one

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

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When Emmalita mentioned that she had a hard time getting into this novel because of the ever changing  points of view, I was hoping it might work better for me. After all, I love World War Z, and I don’t think that one has any repeat narrators – unlike Robocalypse, which structurally looked like it would follow a similar approach but then ended up having reoccurring characters. Unfortunately, she was right. Something about this one didn’t work as well for me as it did in […]



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